


Cheek

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Eleventh Doctor Era, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 11:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11379054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Words that can burn stars, raise up empires, and topple gods. River Song is one of the few people to learn Gallifreyan without being born there.





	Cheek

**Author's Note:**

> This is really a bit of linguistic musing as much as a story, but I like it. Un-Britpicked and un-betaed.

The Time Lord civilization in its final form existed for ten million years before it was destroyed, and the species was older than that. As such, Time Lords were easily the most verbal species in the universe, both by evolution and inclination. Time Lords were known to master languages so fast that they left native speakers uncertain whether they had known them all along and simply remained quiet at first. All Time Lords could read in dreams. The Gallifreyan language was a vast thing, a sprawling Gormenghast of a tongue constructed by a culture that never forgot, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, always labyrinthine. There were different modes of speech, ranging from scalpel-precise scientific dialects to the fluid forms of intimacy. Improvisational modes, where words were invented like verbal jazz. A Vulgar Adversarial mode, where any statement could be made into a curse. Whole vocabularies created for novels and adopted into the whole.

Perhaps predictably, Gallifrey invented the most untranslatable form of poetry ever known. It was a purely written form (and functional in only one alphabet), in which selected letters were replaced by a "neutral mark," meaning that they could be replaced by any suitable letter. An English approximation would be to write w/rd, decreeing that it could mean word, ward, weird, or wyrd as the reader desired. In this observationally constructed poetry, the goal was to make every possible combination meaningful. That is, if Word One could be rendered A, B, or C, and Word Two could mean D, E, or F, then everything from A-D to C-F should be a coherent thought, preferably relating to a theme. Since Time Lords did experience adolescence, the form was always slightly abused by young people who believed that "Midnight alone never-to-be-saved," constituted a reasonable sentence, but the best poems were multi-layered gems. Some of the most profound statements in Gallifreyan literature were technically only one word.

The longest poem in Gallifreyan was epic form, not observationally constructed poetry, and took nineteen hours and three different speakers. It was composed by a reclusive Time Lady in her thirteenth incarnation, which was perhaps to be expected. Time Lords in their thirteenth life often threw themselves into projects they would find less practical in their earlier days.

Few outsiders ever learned Gallifreyan. If the modes and immense vocabulary weren't enough, there was also the proliferation of pronouns. First person pronouns for talking about previous lives, future lives, one's current life, or specialized pronouns for less common situations, with variations based on the rank and relationship of the speakers, the subject's position in time, whether or not the speaker had ever _met_ the future incarnation in question—

Few outsiders ever learned Gallifreyan. Of course, few ever had the chance.

For all that, the _largest_ poem ever written in Gallifreyan was not composed by a native of that planet, nor in a Gallifreyan form. In the summer of 2063, on Earth, a giant blue flaming message appeared briefly on the cliffs of Dover, in Old High Gallifreyan letters that were over twenty feet high. The flames resisted all attempts at extinguishing them, then disappeared abruptly on the fourth day, without even marking the surface. Chemical analysis was inconclusive.

It is, of course, impossible to say whether the locals would have been more alarmed or less if they'd been able to read the message's content: a set of highly dangerous spacetime coordinates in the universal mode and a very naughty limerick concerning the Doctor's bum.


End file.
